PAGE 2
Warning:
Don’t use anything less than 0V or more than 5V for external reference voltage on the AREF pin! If you’re using an external reference on the AREF pin, you must set the analog reference to EXTERNAL before calling analogRead(). Otherwise, you will short together the active reference voltage (internally generated) and the AREF pin, possibly damaging the microcontroller on your Arduino board. Alternatively, you can connect the external reference voltage to the AREF pin through a 5K resistor, allowing you to switch between external and internal reference voltages. Note that the resistor will alter the voltage that gets used as the reference because there is an internal 32K resistor on the AREF pin. The two act as a voltage divider, so, for example, 2.5V applied through the resistor will yield 2.5 * 32 / (32 + 5) = ~2.2V at the AREF pin.
TIME:
The following methods are used to halt the processor for some time. And behaves like timers.
millis:
Returns the number of milliseconds since the Arduino board began running the current program. This number will overflow (go back to zero), after approximately 50 days.
Parameters:
- None
- Returns: Number of milliseconds since the program started (unsigned long)
“Note: Please note that the return value for millis() is an unsigned long, logic errors may occur if a programmer tries to do arithmetic with smaller data types such as int’s. Even signed long may encounter errors as its maximum value is half that of its unsigned counterpart.”
Micros:
Returns the number of microseconds since the Arduino board began running the current program. This number will overflow (go back to zero), after approximately 70 minutes. On 16 MHz Arduino boards (e.g. Duemilanove and Nano), this function has a resolution of four microseconds (i.e. the value returned is always a multiple of four). On 8 MHz Arduino boards (e.g. the LilyPad), this function has a resolution of eight microseconds.
“Note: There are 1,000 microseconds in a millisecond and 1,000,000 microseconds in a second.”
Parameters:
- None
- Returns: Number of microseconds since the program started (unsigned long)
Delay:
Pauses the program for the amount of time (in miliseconds) specified as parameter. (There are 1000 milliseconds in a second.)
Syntax: delay(ms)
Parameters:
- ms: the number of milliseconds to pause (unsigned long)
- Returns: Nothing
delayMicroseconds:
Pauses the program for the amount of time (in microseconds) specified as parameter. There are a thousand microseconds in a millisecond, and a million microseconds in a second.
Currently, the largest value that will produce an accurate delay is 16383. This could change in future Arduino releases. For delays longer than a few thousand microseconds, you should use delay() instead.